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At Computex 2013 in Taiwan, Intel has finally gone into detail on its upcoming mobile parts — Haswell, Merrifield, Bay Trail — and the other exciting technologies that make up each platform, such as Intel’s first 4G LTE modem, Sensor Hub, and Iris graphics. Intel showed off a fanless tablet, based on its new ultra-low-power 6W Haswell parts, showed off tablets and ultrabooks with the the new integrated Iris (HD 5000) graphics, and confirmed that, with Bay Trail, it’s marching into the Android tablet market.

Intel’s keynote began by outlining the current state of the personal computing market. In short, after a brief period of miniaturization (smartphones, netbooks), we are now moving towards devices that getting bigger and giving you more for your money. Smartphones are getting larger, and tablets are regularly being slotted into keyboards to improve productivity. “The two-in-one era: we believe this is the new normal,” said Intel’s sales and marketing bigwig, Tom Kilroy. Intel, with its Merrifield SoC for smartphones, and Bay Trail and Haswell chips for tablets/two-in-one transformers, is perfectly positioned to capitalize on this shift — if Intel is correct about such a shift, anyway.

Just in case we weren’t all aware, Intel also highlighted the monumental shift in our content consumption habits, too. Every day on the internet, consumers spend three times longer watching videos on Hulu than at the cinema. He doesn’t cite Netflix, which is a shame as it completely dwarfs Hulu. In both cases, content is often streamed to smartphones and tablets, which stresses the importance of the mobile radios and hardware playback of high-res video to reduce power consumption.

Intel’s fanless Haswell tablet [Image credit: Engadget]

Which leads us neatly onto the Merrifield (smartphone) and Bay Trail (tablet) SoCs. Powered by the new 22nm Silvermont CPU core — the first new Atom architecture in five years — both SoCs will offer “3x more peak performance, or 5x lower power.” We don’t have any real benchmarks to refer to yet, but it certainly sounds like Merrifield and Bay Trail will compare favorably against the latest ARM-based Snapdragon, Exynos, and Tegra SoCs. Paired with Bay Trail (and probably Merrifield, too), Intel also unveiled the XMM 7160, its first multi-mode 2G/3G/4G LTE-capable modem with global roaming capabilities. The slides also mention that Merrifield will pick up Sensor Hub, a technology suite that Intel first developed for ultrabooks, but which is apparently making the jump to its smartphone platform. Sensor Hub is essentially a clever way for the smartphone to continuously use its sensors (GPS, gyros, etc.) without consuming large amounts of power.

As with Medfield, Intel will show off a Merrifield-based, designed-in-house smartphone at Mobile World Congress in February 2014 — hopefully with 4G LTE. We’re almost certain that there will be a Bay Trail-based Android reference design, too, which should ship before the end of the year — again, with 4G LTE. On stage, Intel demoed a Bay Trail prototype streaming 4K video over an LTE connection. With LTE and SoCs that can keep up with ARM, will Intel finally wade into the US market? I think so.

Scenario Design Power explained

Moving back to Haswell, this morning Intel also unveiled its dual-core, mobile-oriented Haswell parts. As the complete list of SKUs had already leaked, there aren’t really any surprises in the lineup. For the most part, these chips are the same as their quad-core desktop brethren, just with half the cores. The most exciting chips are the Core i7-4650U, which is equipped with the new Intel Iris (HD 5000) GPU, and the Core i5-4200Y, which hits an SDP (see slide for explanation) of just 6W. There’s no price on the i5 part, but the i7 with fancy graphics will cost a rather dear $454. The Iris-enabled mobile parts should see a performance boost of around 25% over Ivy Bridge’s integrated GPU. Gaming with integrated graphics just became a reality, basically.

It sounds like this fall will be full of two-in-one designs, featuring low-power Haswell chips in the tablet, and some kind of keyboard-and-battery docking station. Perhaps most excitingly, Intel showed off a fanless Haswell tablet, but unfortunately didn’t give us any details (it was probably the 6W Core i5 part). Between Bay Trail and Haswell, though, it’s clear that there will be some very powerful Intel-powered tablets and ultrabooks this year.

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